100 Days
by Eumelia
Summary: One-hundred short glimpses into the depths of their world. Some happy, some sad. Using a 100 theme challenge template gone awry.
1. Chapter 1

100 Days

Disclaimer: I do not own nor make any profit from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. I just write stories for the heck of it.

Notes: I found a 100 theme challenge, and decided to do it my own way, using TTGL.

1. "introduction"

"He's got no family now." "Poor thing…" "Well, who's going to take care of him?"

Whispers bled together in the clump of onlookers; folded arms and saddened faces looking out from the herd towards the huddled figure in a tattered brown cloak. Between the adult bodies, lanky arms pressed them apart in a last ditch effort to get from the back to the front to see the object of their attentions. They were all so pale, and it disturbed him to see how white they were, near-albino. Life underground sapping them of all color. How long until they became blind, like the white cave fish in the Deepest darkness? He looked up at the grey, gaunt faces, young face already creased with the beginnings of an inability to accept his life as it stood.

They worshipped misery.

The young boy was sitting by piled, broken stone where he'd been left. He couldn't have been more than nine, a too-skinny, half-starved little wretch nobody had bothered approaching after the incident. Where once had been the mouth of a digger's tunnel, all that remained was a crumbling grave. Gossip held that both of them had gone down in there. The woman, and the man. Mother and father. The son had tagged along, clinging to his mother's skirts. And behind them, lingering quietly, the orphaned child. The hell-raiser who was currently at the forefront of the chatter. He was the one who knew the boy's parents would not come up. They were gone for good. He could tell the boy knew it as well, in the defeated slump of his shoulders and the haunted bags under his dark eyes.

_TAKE HIM! FOR GOD'S SAKE, PLEASE!_

He almost wanted to clap his hands over his ears to rid himself of that horrid scream; the shrill, ragged sobs of a mother, shoving her beloved son away, back into the arms of the "delinquent" who's father had "abandoned" him. He remembered the weight of a boy's life, his bloodcurling screams as ceiling and walls crumbled down on his mother right before his eyes; his father just out of view until he'd thrown the pair headlong out of the mouth of the cave entrance.

Misery. The underground was full of it, and **he** was _sick_ of it!

Yet to grow into his barely-teenaged form, he separated from the crowd and began an era. A timeless encounter that would shape the future. The lone wolf made his way to Simon, putting his arms lightly about his shoulders, to draw him back into his embrace.

"It's okay now. _Aniki_'s got you."


	2. Chapter 2

2. "love"

Disclaimer: I do not own nor make any profit from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. I just write stories for the heck of it.

Notes: I made two versions of "Love" actually, because two different ideas came to mind. One after another will be posted, and you can decide which one you like best.

_"The people of the past said love could move mountains, you know." She told him, her crimson head laid against his chest. Her fingers were tangled once more in his, and he flexed his rough hand against her equally battle-roughened one. Waiting for dawn, and the taking of the Dai-Ganzan. Yoko lifted her head to smile at him, her eyes aglow with some sort of all-powerful emotion. One that healed worlds and stoked the fire in a man's heart. "We can move them. Can't we Kamina?"_

It burned.

There was no other way to describe his world at that moment. From his left hip curving straight to his left shoulder, he was numb. But he was burning. Fingers fumbled weakly for the audio, pressing into it to mute his cockpit from the others he was linked to; a blood-streaked trail fell from it as his hand collapsed to his side. None of them needed to hear what came next.

Bloodcurdling screams. Kamina was screaming. He was bleeding throughout, and by the way he could feel his body burning, he knew it was fatal. He gasped on his own blood, hands fighting to close the gaping slice torn up his slice. His eyes focused hazily on the hole in the back of the Gurren. _That. That was where Thymilph got through_. Hundreds of pounds of pressure shoving through metal and wire and cleaving through his side with the ease of a knife through **milk**.

"S'no that bad, damn it." He gritted out between the flare of excruciating pain. "Not bad. Not bad." He could barely talk, blood was working through his throat and out one corner of his mouth. Thymilph must have struck a lung, because it hurt to breath. He could hear his own blood gurgling in his throat, in his lung. "Bad… God, damn it. Damn it." He was growing hoarse, falling weaker and weaker, unable to talk so much as scream. _It hurts… It hurts so much. Fuck, fuck!_ He thought madly and then broke down raggedly, coughing blood across the floor of his battered cockpit. "I'm going to die! Oh god! I'm gonna die! Please!" He sobbed, "I don't want to die!" It was the falling apart he was glad nobody was seeing, nobody was hearing. Nobody needed to hear the Great Kamina sobbing in the face of his oncoming death.

He felt his own damn heart flutter, and he was still bleeding. Growing silent on the floor, he managed to turn the sound back on. _Let me hear them…_ He thought fuzzily. _I just want to hear them one last time. Damn it. Simon… Please be okay._

"Yoko…"

And then. He faded away.

**/Aniki!/**

_I'm scared._

**/Kamina!/**

_Don't make me come back._

**/O-oi! Fucker! Stop playing g-games you know!/**

_It hurts._

_"--the people of the past said love could move mountains, you know."_

A cacophony of noise through the comlink. Haunted eyes opened and he pushed a hand underneath himself. Catatonic, on autopilot. Kamina blew a breath out weakly and scoffed.

"Can't even let a man die in peace, can you?"

Because love was some all-powerful emotion, one that healed words and stoked the fire in a man's heart. And love was not going to let him rest.


	3. Chapter 3

2. "love"

Disclaimer: I do not own nor make any profit from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. I just write stories for the heck of it.

Notes: I made two versions of "Love" actually, because two different ideas came to mind. One after another will be posted, and you can decide which one you like best. Besides that, I know it's never EVER a good idea to write "you" to an audience, but I had to try it at least once to see how it feels.

"Hey! Hey, wait up a second!"

She's just as lovely as the day she left you. Seven years gone by so fast, and neither of you are the young bloods you once were. Not anymore, not really. You hear she has kids, not her own, she tells you. Your pulse finally seems to settle down after that assurance. Apparently, she's become a teacher, on some island, far, far away from the city. Where the air is fresh and the water cool, and where she doesn't have to obey command nor fear the public's own fears.

And you have missed her terribly.

"Been a while, hasn't it?" She asks you, her perfect fingers—gloved—brushing back a strand of her perfect hair—red—to tuck it behind her ear. And all the familiar emotions came rushing back into your eyes. All the memories, the horrors and the triumps. God, she's become such a woman. Then again, you're not so young a man yourself anymore.

"Sure has," You say, by way of getting her to walk with you for a while longer. Hoping she doesn't leave this time, ride away on that hovercraft and leave you to fend among the battalions, watching your "scrap metal" be stored, even destroyed as "obsolete". And with it, your heart split in two—one going with her, one dying, possibly, with that mech of yours. You're fumbling over what to say to her. Has she mended from that loss? Seven years ago, her loss that left her hurting ten times worse, instead of feeling ten times better. Do you think she'll ever love again?

You hope so, and you hope it's you who she'll pick.

"So, uh…" You rub the back of your head, and hope that your uniform makes you look dashing. "Wanna' go out to eat tonight? T-to welcome you back, I mean!"

For a minute, you think you've got no chance. Look at her! And… well, look at **you**. But then she nods her head, and Yoko smiles at you: "I'd love to go, Kittan."

And you feel like your future has just gotten ten times better.


	4. Chapter 4

3. "light"

Disclaimer: I do not own nor make any profit from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. I just write stories for the heck of it.

Notes: None.

"Why was I born?" She hardly thought it was an unworthy question to her father, the man with the darkly wise eyes and the knowledge even of the far reaches of the universe. She remembered the limp way she sat on his knee, her fingers laced across her lap. Looking at him, with blank eyes—that doll-like gaze. But her father saw something in those eyes that he did not accept in the world he had recreated. He saw Awakening. He saw her realizing herself. Individualization. Seceding. He father said nothing to her, but he picked her up in his arms and handed her to his closest general, moving her away from her sisters. Sisters, she thought, that were unlike her. No light, no knowledge. No questions.

Her awareness grew even as she was carried by the strange beastman. Her brow creased, she rubbed her eyes as if finally realizing her surroundings. "General… Cytomander?" She questioned in a sweet voice, looking up at the sharply angled face. "Why am I different than you?" Her hands touched his face, and he jounced her, trying to keep her down at his hip as he carried her. So he couldn't touch her, so he didn't feel like he had a heart.

"You have Spiral." He said briskly, trying not to look at her as he brought her down farther within the Teppelin, down to a dark room with stacks and stacks of boxes. "You asked questions."

"Why does that make me different?"

"It just does!" He snapped at her, and when he caught the wide-eyed, confused look on his face he reneged on his words. "You're different Princess." He sat her on the soft pillow of one of the boxes, leaning over her as he put his hand at the top and gave one of those neurotic, twitchy smiles of his. "Ever heard of the story of Sleeping Beauty?"

She shook her head.

"It was an old tale from the humans," He looked up at the edge of the box, as if trying to remember. "There was this… beautiful princess who was cursed by an evil sorceress, that she would prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel, and she'd die when she became an adult."

Nia watched him, sitting upon her knees in the box with a curious expression. And the bird General seemed to swallow hard when he saw that. He knew what it meant. "So, a good fairy, taking pity on her changed the curse. She wouldn't die, but she would fall asleep for one-hundred years… until she was woken by true love's first kiss." Nia looked delighted, and his fingers clenched on the top of the box, forming a fist. "He fought his way to her, and through the brambles and the briars and woke her after her one-hundred years."

"That's… Well, what'd she say to him? When she first woke up?"

"She said," He seemed to think fast: " 'Good morning'." And then in a flurry of motion, he pressed her down into the box and slammed the lid down on her startled expression. There was no happy ending for the little Princess, as he ordered one of Thymilph's displaced soldiers to dispose of the box.

But when Simon opened her box, that was the first thing she said to her Prince.


	5. Chapter 5

4. "dark"

Disclaimer: I do not own nor make any profit from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. I just write stories for the heck of it.

Notes: None, beyond a crossover between 100 Days and another TTGL story I'm planning, where Kamina was a Spiral Warrior alongside Genome.

"It's dark now. All is finished." Anti-Spiral said with a certain distant exhaustion. The warriors were finally quiet, finally put deep into their dreams and their hopes. Living peacefully in the worlds they wanted most to have, most to protect. He'd given it to them, in exchange for the end of their fighting. He'd even taken care of the molepig, and his old nemesis as well. "You were one of the last ones I expected to see coming back, Genome. I thought I took care of your will a long, long time ago." He muttered, looking into the glass jar in which the old Spiral Warrior's head was contained.

"I have to get back to the harbinger now." Nia. He was talking about the young woman he was destroying, ripping apart to get her information, to understand the Spiral power, to manipulate it to finally wipe it out and all that possessed even the faintest glimmer of it's light. Anti-Spiral stepped forwards longly, as if readying his vanishing act.

"Stop."

That voice. It made him stop indeed, only to turn around slowly and look at that all-too familiar pair of red eyes. Narrowed, glowering, defiant.

"I thought you were dead… After all, that is how I cursed you. I thought you ran out of chances, finally ran out of willpower. Death by violent means at a young age, that's what I laid on you—never to see your hopes and dreams coming to fruition. Everything falling apart one life after another until you knew the **true** meaning of despair. Isn't that right, Kamina?"

"You know, I never remember your face until I die." Captured like a memory, Kamina did not look a day older than the day he died. He floated, untouchable—perhaps not even real, not even there. He gave the black-and-white figure a serious look, "You'll be finished this time though. There's no way you can win, Anti-Spiral. You've finally made your mistake." Kamina's eyes flickered across the bridge, to all of the men and women he'd known and wished he'd known, all of those who were trapped in the darkness of false dreams.

"And what, Spiral Warrior, pray tell, is that?"

A cocky grin lit up Kamina's face, as he began to flicker weakly in the face of Anti-Spiral's dimension, forced to leave it again, to find a place to latch onto, to get his message through.- "You took their love. You threatened their world. You killed their friends." There, he'd found the point to break through the dream. In Simon's world, the root of everything, there was where he could make his own last stand. Kamina flickered heartily, like a Cheshire Cat fading from the world to god-knew where: "Humans," He said wickedly, "Are not satisfied with mere dreams. Humans, Anti-Spiral, do not just lay down and die."

And Anti-Spiral felt his own world get a little bit darker.


End file.
